Author: Samuel Postell
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States sue HHS to overturn public health emergency rule
Texas and Oklahoma filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on January 18, 2023, arguing that an Obama-era federal regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) granting the World Health Organization (WHO) authority to define what constitutes a public health emergency infringes on national…
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District court affirms president’s authority to increase federal contractor minimum wage
Judge John J. Tuchi of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona on January 6, 2023, rejected a challenge from a coalition of states and held that President Joe Biden (D) did not exceed his authority when he issued an executive order directing the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to promulgate regulations increasing…
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Governors ask Biden administration to lift COVID-19 public health emergency
Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) and 24 governors from other states, on December 19, 2022, signed a letter asking President Joe Biden (D) to end the COVID-19 federal public health emergency (PHE) in April 2023. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declared the COVID-19 federal PHE on January 27, 2020. The PHE…
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Direct Legislative Appointment method produces the lowest average partisanship confidence score for state supreme court justices according to the Ballotpedia Courts: State Partisanship study.
Direct legislative appointment yields the lowest average partisan confidence score for state supreme court justices of any method, according to the Ballotpedia Courts: State Partisanship study. The Michigan-Ohio method produced the highest average partisan confidence score of 11 for all justices, while the direct legislative appointment method produced an average partisan confidence score of 5…
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Idaho Supreme Court justice announces retirement
Idaho Supreme Court Justice Roger Burdick is retiring on June 30, 2021. He was appointed to this position in 2003 by Republican Gov. Dirk Kempthorne and retained by voters in 2004, 2010 and 2016. His current term would have expired in January 2023. Burdick’s replacement will be Republican Governor Brad Little’s first appointment to the…
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Oklahoma Supreme Court rules that Gov. Stitt overstepped his authority in negotiating two gaming compacts without legislative approval
On January 26, 2021, the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued an opinion in Treat v. Stitt, a case regarding the governor’s power to renegotiate state gaming compacts. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Speaker of the House Charles McCall (R) and Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Treat (R) who argued that Governor Kevin Stitt (R)…
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Gov. Sununu (R) to nominate Attorney General Gordon MacDonald to New Hampshire Supreme Court
On January 6, 2021, Gov. Chris Sununu (R) announced that he will renominate Attorney General Gordan MacDonald (R) to the New Hampshire State Supreme Court. In New Hampshire, the governor makes nominations to the state supreme court and those nominees are then subject to the approval of the Executive Council. In order for the nominee…
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2020’s state supreme court elections resulted in changes on two of country’s least homogenous courts
The partisan makeup of two of the country’s most politically divided state supreme courts changed as a result of the 2020 elections, according to a Ballotpedia ranking of states by supreme court partisanship. As part of the Ballotpedia Courts: State Partisanship study, Ballotpedia assigned each state supreme court justice a partisan confidence score based on…
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Ballotpedia publishes special study on state supreme court partisanship
Ballotpedia recently published a study on state supreme courts entitled “Ballotpedia Courts: State Partisanship”. Among the findings, the study showed that there has been an increase in partisanship on the state courts over the past ten years and that there is a correlation between the partisanship of justices selected for state supreme courts and the…
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Ballotpedia publishes state court partisanship study
Each state has at least one supreme court, or court of last resort. Oklahoma and Texas each have two such courts, one for civil appeals and one for criminal appeals. Ballotpedia Courts: State Partisanship—a culmination of eight months of research and compilation of raw data—supplies Partisan Confidence Scores for 341 active state supreme court justices on all…